It’s not just for rubbish teams, rubbish drivers too. Not that I’m suggesting either of Manor’s drivers are unable to drive in F1, but they do have a grand total of one race between them. Albert park is fairly easy to obey blue flags thankfully so hopefully they shouldn’t get in the way too much.

It’s not really the same as last year as the engine isn’t new for them, we’ve seen from Mercedes that the cars can be reliable out of the box this season.

I’m personally hoping these rumours about their finances aren’t true. I can’t hold the Manor situation against them considering Marussia couldn’t even make the last few races of last year, and there’s no guarantee they would be any better prepared now.

To be fair I think the airhorns have gone out of fashion since then, cant remember the last time I heard one (I wouldn’t be surprised if they’ve been banned). I agree though, the atmosphere has been a bit flat for a while now.

I went last year, I got absolutely soaked (the race got red flagged for rain eventually) so be prepared for that. It’s almost always cold at Silverstone so bring a coat even if it’s sunny, there’s usually a cold wind. Bring some comfortable shoes too as it’s a long way around.

The cars are fairly loud, I used my headphones as ear defenders which worked pretty well, if you don’t have anything you might find the noise gets too much after a while. The LMP cars aren’t super loud but the LMP2 and GT cars are. Radio Le Mans were covering the race last year so having something portable with a good FM radio signal was very handy for keeping up with developments. I assume they’ll be there this year too.

As far as seating is concerned you’ll probably want to check a few places out, my favourite for the WEC last year was the inside of Vale, although they had boards up on the fence which limited the view a bit unfortunately. Otherwise Becketts is a great place to watch the cars but it’s quite far away from everything, the outside of Club and Luffield are pretty good and also the grandstands at The Loop. It depends how much walking you want to do really, Luffield and Club (if I remember correctly) are the best spots near to food stalls, but you could also struggle to find a decent seat as they’re quite popular.

Speaking of food you might want to bring your own, the stalls are fairly extortionate and the quality isn’t great. I don’t know if you’re actually allowed to but as long as it’s out of sight when you enter I doubt very much you’d have a problem.

I doubt McLaren can afford it or have the manpower, they don’t have the resources of Red Bull or Ferrari. Who knows what agreement Kevin has with them. There will certainly be a bit of a queue at McLaren in the next few years though, Vandoorne can probably do one or two more years in feeder series then he’ll have to be in F1 in some capacity, and de Vries will be on the scene by then too.

I don’t think you can really blame McLaren though, they were obviously expecting Kevin to learn alongside Button, then Alonso suddenly became available and they could hardly turn him down.

What I hope happens is a smaller team takes one of their drivers in return for a cheaper engine/drivetrain deal (I’m not sure this would happen as Honda quite often like to place Japanese drivers in), like Bianchi at Marussia. Magnussen could use a year in the midfield to sort out his driving, he had some speed this year but he got in way too many incidents, he needs to cool off a bit and let the results come to him.

I finished Tony Brooks’ autobiography recently ( http://www.f1fanatic.co.uk/2012/05/20/poetry-motion-tony-brooks-autobiography-reviewed/ ), it gives a good insight into the feel of the paddock and his mindset at the time, he compares his driving philosophy to others and explains why sometimes he was more competitive than others (usually because he has a better car!). It was obviously written by Tony himself so the writing isn’t always brilliant, but I could easily overlook that for the information contained, and his story itself is quite riveting, he drove in a very interesting era.